I'm a geochemist. In the past ten years I've fixed mass spectrometers, blasted sapphires with a laser beam, explored for uranium in a nature reserve, and measured growth patterns in fish ears, and helped design the next generation of the world's most advanced ion probe. My main interest is in-situ mass spectrometry, but I have a soft spot in my heart for thermodynamics, drillers, and cosmochemistry.

Monday, July 28, 2014

I have mentioned before that Changi Airport in Singapore is a step above your average travel hub, to the point of seeming almost magical to the sleep-deprived, Jetlagged traveller.. But this is the first time I have been here in the daytime. So I made sure to stop in to see the butterfly garden. A step above EWR. So here are some phone pictures:

Saturday, July 26, 2014

These days mostly I build scientific instrumentation- I
don’t do a lot of science. But last year
I did get a small grant to look at some novel stuff. I don’t want to go into it right now; but the
process was interesting enough to share.
Figure one shows how we thought the project would progress; that is what
we proposed to the funding body.

Figure 1: We’ll do this- what could possibly go wrong?

Figure two is how it all actually went down. Obviously,
there were a few complications, dead-ends, and in the end we discovered some
cool stuff, which was actually not too far from where we were aiming to
go. The point is that science,
especially natural science, does not always flow in a linear, predictable,
orderly manner. But if you’re lucky, it
does eventually go somewhere.

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

The Geological Society of America’s (GSA) Mineralogy,
Geochemistry, Petrology, and Volcanology (MGPV) division has announced a new Early
Career award. Details are available here. Any GSA member can nominate a contender, using the process described in
the announcement. Any geoblogger who
has bemoaned the unrepresentativeness of nominees for previous awards in various Earth Science organizations can use this
opportunity to create a more representative pool of candidates. As, indeed, can any other GSA members.

Tuesday, July 01, 2014

On the Planetary Society website, the normally responsible and
pro-science Planetary Society has posted an opinion piece by Louis Freedman and
Tom Jones asking NASA to reconsider its refusal to fund the Asteroid Redirect
Mission. In short, this is a mission to
kidnap a small asteroid from elsewhere in the inner solar system, and redirect
it towards the earth, hopefully parking it in the most stable lunar orbit they
can find (the Moon’s uneven gravity, and the tidal interactions between the
Earth and Sun, tend to make most lunar orbits unstable). Once there, the asteroid can do three things:

1. Fall into the Moon.

2. Fall into the Earth.

3. Be ejected into an Earth-crossing orbit around the sun.

One of the goals of this project is to give manned space
missions a target that is easier to get to and from than either a wild inner
solar system asteroid, or the Moon.
Because this will give them a stepping stone to Mars.

The prospect of asteroid redirection technology being used
to crash asteroids into the Earth doesn’t seem to faze Drs. Freedman and Jones;
they don’t lay our any risk assessment or amelioration plans. But
an asteroid strike on Earth, especially a targeted asteroid strike, could be
extremely damaging, as only nuclear weapons are capable of putting as much
energy into the atmosphere in a comparable amount of time. And any
asteroid-fetching spacecraft could be communicated with by a dish pretty much
anywhere on Earth at some points during its flight.

Amateurs often build radio receivers, point them at the sky,
and listed to NASA spacecraft. To date,
nobody has managed to hack one, but there has been very little incentive to do
so. Putting a asteroid redirecting
spacecraft into the inner solar system that is a computer hack away from
becoming a weapon of mass destruction seems like a pretty rash thing to do, so
I am surprised that the Planetary Society is advocating this.

Disclaimer:

All opinions, measurements, figures, and facts on this page are the personal opinions of Charles W. Magee, Jr, and do not represent the views of any of his employers: past, present, present-but-about-to-be-past, or future. None of the content herein has been subject to peer review, and should be treated with caution or derision. Any passing mention of OSHA code violations, criminal activities, unethical or unscientific behavior, or the clandestine Australian nuclear weapons program are fictions created to make rhetorical points, and do not represent the reality of my, or anyone else's, workplace. Do not attempt any scientific protocols described herein at home, with the exception of the chocolate chip cookie recipe. Do not apply the products of that protocol to individuals with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or cholesterol, egg, wheat, dairy, or chocolate allergies. Do not view this blog continuously for more than 45 minutes without stretching and taking other precautions to prevent computer-related chronic injury.
email labhampster@gmail.com, but replace hampster with the arctic rodent after which this blog is named.